Pages

Monday, October 10, 2011

Why is it that you often start doing things in SharePoint that you find really useful, and when you have almost reached your goal - the whole idea just falls? This happened to me when I setup a taxonomy for a department, we built the trees and deployed them to the libraries. All looked really good and we should start adding files. And when you setup a new intranet, you usually have a lot of files you want to upload at the same time to the libraries. No worries, I told them to upload all files and we would add the metadata tags through the datasheet view. NOT! That did not work and we also got a readonly message. Embarassing... So well sorry, you will have to edit the files one by one. Well that is not a realistic scenario. Then the column filtering was messed up, it is not possible to filter on metadata tags that are cascaded. And also, in the datasheet view the values have got a number and a hashtag in front of the value.
Sigh!!

And yes, I know that managed metadata is very useful for many other situations, but when it comes to using it in libraries where you need to frequently update metadata tags, then it is not useful.

Please send me all your argues to convince me that I am wrong!! Because I really like the concept of managed metadata.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Always a challenge to install service packs, and today (after having a snapshot of my new SP installation) I installed, in the following order:
SP Foundation SP1, reboot
SP Server SP1, reboot
Run Config wizard, reboot
Restart USP - worked (but you need to have the farm admin account in Local Admins group)
New snapshot
CU for Foundation, reboot
CU for Server, reboot
Run config wizard
Config wizard failed
Powershell and force upgrade
Config wizard successful
USP - failed to start the service
Knew it!
Found that the FIM (Forefront Identity Manager) groups locally were empty
Added the farm admin account to those groups
Now the USP started
Could run the full sync again
Imported all profiles and imported the AD pictures (thumbnailPhoto property) as well, nice!
Will try to remove the farm account from the local admin group tomorrow and run a full sync
Then find out which of the FIM groups the farm account needs to stay in, one by one
New snapshot
Done.
Not too bad.

I have setup a new SP 2010 server farm this week, and it all went very well actually. But if you use the correct account settings and configure most of the things manually (like the dreaded UPS) then everything should work just fine. There are some messages in the Health Analyzer that needs to be taken care of though, unless you've done this a couple of times. You'll learn :) One of them is if you create some of the service applications that are dependent on the Secure Store, for instance Performance Point or Visio. Then you need to setup an unattended service account.

The warning in Health Analyzer:
﻿﻿

If you click on that warning, the following message is displayed:

Go to your Service applications, click on "Secure store service":

You'll get a message saying that you have to generate a key:

Look in the ribbon right above the message, and you have a button called "Generate new key":

You are prompted to enter a passphrase (this will be used for adding new secure store service servers or if you need to restore this service):

Then you are told that there are no target applications in this service, no shit! Let's create one then :)
Click on "New" in the ribbon:

Now add the name of your target app id, for instance "Visio" or maybe the name of your external data source, add a Display name, contact email, target application type (which decides HOW your users should authenticate - as them selves or as a group, I selected "individual") and then just click "Next":

Add the account name and password that connects to the external source. The "masked" means if you wish to mask the characters, and of course we want that for the passwords. Click "Next":

﻿

Add the adminstrators of this target application and you are done!

But, later you also need to "Set" the credentials of the users who should have access to this secure store:

Thursday, September 1, 2011

I am proud to announce that I passed exam 70-667, configuring SharePoint 2010. Which gives an MCTS title. It was not so hard, some questions were really easy actually. But of course, when you have worked with a product since 2003, you should know some stuff about it!!

Friday, July 15, 2011

I have registered my account on the new "Facebook killer app" (as media calls it), Google+. Can't say that I am too impressed. It is a quite simple UI, too large fonts (what will happen to that news feed when there are as many users as on FB?), not much happens in there and what is the real purpose of it - other then "killing FB"? One cool thing though, is "Circles" which means that I can add anyone I like without that person approving it, just to be able to follow them like on Twitter. So it has not that security restrictions like FB has. But still you can of course control who can read your updates and so on. I would like to be able to add my Twitter feed, and also add my blog feed to it so that all my networks are connected. Have not seen any functionality for that yet. Also, I was invited to join G+ with my private mail and not my gmail account and now I can't change that, which is really stupid. I would rather use my gmail account so the mail is connected.
Anyway, I will give it some time and see if it gets more interesting, but for now I prefer good old FB :)

Sunday, July 10, 2011

My old blog url was miss-sharepoint.blogspot.com but that name was lame, so I have changed the URL to sharepointbabe.blogspot.com which is my aka - self announced of course, and I am sure it always bugs someone ;) I think it's an awesome name!
The downside of switching URL is that my followers are gone, and since there is no redirect function here you will only get a stupid message saying the blog does not exist anymore, and with no reference to this new URL.
But I hope you guys will find me again and hopefully come back to me!
Oh, and one more thing: I am working with SP2010 again... I love it :)
Have a great summer!